This entry will be strewn with quotations from Alan Bennett - in his memoirs Writing home - whom I admire. He hails from the north, and hit a familiar note talking about a local library, which is of course territory I know a bit. In those days Armley Junior Library at the bottom of Wesley Road in Leeds bound all its volumes in heavy maroon or black, so that The Adventures of Milly Molly Mandy was every bit as forbidding as The Anatomy of Melancholy. Another short extract sketches in his position in the spectrum of playwrights of which he is an eminent example: An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail, listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre. He appeals to me!
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| At the Val du Séran |
Refugees
by Brian Bilston
They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way
(now read from bottom to top)
We have been so excited by the doings of the England cricket team, and knowing New Zealand are no longer the tinpot team they used to be only heightens the enjoyment of such stunning victories. I'm (as a Yorkshireman by the strict definition, though playing cricket for Yorkshire would be like the other side of the moon for me) all the same I have a pride in their doing well and some additional pleasure that racism seems to be being pushed back in that county club. But now Wimbledon is on us, and we'll certainly watch some alongside the Tour de France once we get back from the Val du Séran. Here is Bennett on a bad lad from another era of tennis: McEnroe behaves badly at Wimbledon and in one particularly ludicrous moment shouts at a linesman, ‘You’re a disgrace to the human race.’ Some group captain on the high chair then docks him a point and an argument ensues as to whether McEnroe was, as he insists, talking to himself and, if he was, whether it was in order to talk to oneself on court (or even breathe). Of course, now that Wimbledon is all about money, behaving badly is exactly what is required, certainly of McEnroe, and all the claptrap about decency and fair play is just the English at their usual game of trying to have it both ways. Wimbledon is now a spectacle, just as a wrestling match, say, is a spectacle, and a spectacle needs a Hero and a Villain. It’s a contest between Right and Wrong, not because McEnroe is particularly badly behaved but because the Wimbledon authorities have sold out to television and this kind of drama is just what viewers enjoy. So McEnroe doesn’t really have a choice, only a role. Many of McEnroe’s critics point out how Connors has ‘reformed’: how three or four years ago he was the rogue, disputing calls, not attending the line-up, and how much better behaved he is now. This misses the point. Connors has to be better behaved, not because his character has changed or his tennis manners have improved but because he has no part in the spectacle. Or if he had (if he had beaten Borg in the semi-final for instance) he would have had to be cast in the Hero’s role. I like Alan Bennett because he comes at things from different angles.
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| From our hotel in Beaujolais on the way to the Ain |
Although Bennett is a fairly authentic adoptive Londoner and his orbit - Camden Town and the lower reaches of Hampstead - are familiar places for us, and apart from his Yorkshire roots which also define him, he has become a seasoned traveller to America and Europe Here is a bit about a visit to France, which also touches on other places we know quite well: Six days in France, much of it in drenching rain, driving round Provence. Most towns and villages now meticulously restored – Lacoste, Les Baux, Aries, Uzés, the cobbles relaid, the stone cleaned and patched, everywhere scrubbed and made ready – for what? Well, for art mainly. For little shops selling cheap jewellery or baskets, for galleries with Provençal pottery and fabrics, bowls and beads and ‘throws’. Better, having done the clean-up, to put a machine-shop in one of these caves, a butcher’s where a butcher’s was, a dry-cleaner’s even. But no, it’s always art, dolls, kitchenware, tea-towels. And people throng (myself included), Les Baux like Blackpool. Arles is better because a working place still, and with a good museum of monumental masonry – early Christian altarpieces, Roman gravestones – and beneath it a labyrinth of arcaded passages that ran under the old Roman forum. The Musée Arlaten, on the other hand, is rather creepy, the walls crowded with primitive paintings of grim females – Arlésiennes presumably – and roomfuls of nineteenth-century folkish artefacts, collected under the aegis of the trilby-hatted poet Frédéric Mistral, whose heavily moustached image is everywhere. Many of the rooms contain costumed dummies which are only fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in Psycho. Then to an antique fair in the middle of some zone industrielle, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great bullying wardrobes, huge ponderous mirrors and cabinets of flowery china. For the first time in my life I find myself longing for a breath of stripped pine.
Alan Bennett quite often refers to music, if only because he encounters it as a screenwriter, and his anecdotes are often fun. For instance : Maurice Miles, whom I as a boy in Leeds used to see conducting the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. Miles was a balletic conductor who very much fancied himself on the rostrum, fond of shooting his cuffs and fetching the brass in with a flourish. Denys was chatting with him one night after a concert when Miles broke off to have a word with the leading horn-player, a dour Yorkshireman. ‘What went wrong tonight, George? Something, I wasn’t quite sure.’ ‘Well, let’s put it like this, Mr Miles, it’s very hard to come in on the fourth rattle of the cufflinks.’
And to finish with a pen picture of the north country [In Yorkshire for a family funeral] Wake at 5.30 a.m. and hear a cock crow. A cock, unaware that it has turned into a cliché, unselfconsciously goes on maintaining a rustic tradition, fulfilling its role in the environment. The corn mill is restored, the drystone-waller demonstrates his craft, the thatchers bind their reeds and the cocks crow. Country craft. The hearse and the attendant cars are grey and low-slung, so that it looks more like the funeral of a Mafia boss than of an ex-tram-driver. As we come out of the chapel cousin Geoff, who always takes the piss, shouts at my Uncle Jim, the last surviving brother, and who’s deaf, ‘Head of the clan now, Uncle’. ‘Aye,’ Uncle Jim shouts back. ‘There’s nobbut me now.’
I take the train back. Through county after county the fields are alight. It’s like taking a train through the Thirty Years War.
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